No. I feel that Top Chef is the best show about Rosanne Barr and her family. I don't even know why they brought this other show back. Actually, Rosanne is not even the second best show about Rosanne Barr and her family. The second best show was Cake Wars.

I saw about 10 minutes of it and while the political stuff was really clunky, all the actors sank back into their characters fairly well (except for Rosanne's sister, who was too over the top).

I was a fan of it back in the day. Doubt I'd watch it now, but I can see this doing well going forward. It would once again fill a big void on TV in depicting a poor white family. Po' folk just don't end up on TV a lot.

At the very least, the Trump folks will rally around it.

As long as they play both sides for laughs*, they can avoid being a #MAGA show and actually be about average Americans, just as it used to be.

We'll see.

*They veered a little too close to playing the grandson for laughs, as if they were mocking gender issues, but they also made Rosanne and Dan seem kind of out of touch on the issue, too.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

Bullshit. The Middle and Raising Hope were both successful sitcoms about not-well-to-do families. Always Sunny is arguably the best sitcom this country has ever produced, and the characters all live in squalor. And that's just this century. Roseanne's success is based off the Family Ties formula (50 percent comedy, 50 percent morals/lesson of the week) it used to tell each story, not because the characters lived in a fly-over state in non-glamorous conditions. Compare it to The Honeymooners, a sitcom about poor people that relies on situation and comedy (and not guilt trips) to keep you (successfully) interested for 30 minutes. Try watching an entire episode of Roseanne from 1990, and it will remind you how awful most US comedy shows were (and still are).

Honestly, the most realistic depiction of poverty in a comedy show that I have seen is Trailor Park Boys. That shit was mostly spot on. Mind you spoiled mutha fuckahs, I grew up in a Section 8 housing project. We was fucking poh. I know what it is like.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

It's a pretty damning statement about how much people cling to the past that a sitcom like Roseanne is getting dusted off for new episodes twenty years after the original run ended. Hey, I liked the show back in the day, but who the hell was sitting around for the last TWO DECADES pining for the show and wondering what the characters were up to?

I mean, how many of these recent TV revivals have been any good? X-Files has had MAYBE a half-dozen decent-ish episodes out of the last two seasons. They tried bringing back 24 twice (once with Jack Bauer, once without), and audiences yawned both times. Did anyone even notice they brought back Heroes a few years back? The Netflix version of MST3K fared pretty well, mainly because that was a show that went through several different hosts, 'bot voices, networks and concept changes during its original run, but name another recent TV rehash that really worked. We gonna see a new version of Stranger Things in 2038 with the children of the current show's cast going on another adventure? At this point, I'm completely with Kylo Ren's philosophy of "Let the past die. Kill it if you must."

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.- George Lucas 1988

But I do agree, I also understand why they get made. Same reason we get so many sequels, fan base, aka a built in audience. It is an easier sell, seamingly safer, than trying something new.

It'd be one thing if these revival seasons actually added something new to the original runs of the show, but in most cases, the original shows had already devolved into mediocrity long before they ended anyways, so who wants to see even more mediocrity, only with the added kick-in-the-teeth of seeing the how old the original cast has become? Hey, I really, really wanted the new X-Files seasons to capture the buzzy heights of the first five or so seasons of the original run (I was obsessed with the show back in the day), but all these new seasons offered were even more anemic retreads and/or retcons of lame conspiracy plots that had already been run into the ground by the eighth season. It's like Scully wistfully said in that "Lost Art Of Forehead Sweat" revival episode written by Darin Morgan, "I want to remember it as it was." Who wants to bet that ABC will bring back Lost within the next few years, and that, after an initial bout of interest, the ratings will tail off as quickly as the new seasons of The X-Files did?

At least the gap between the Fox and Comedy Central seasons of Futurama gave the creators a chance to creatively refuel without being so long as to beggar disbelief that the new episodes even existed. Plus, with animation, characters never need to "age" in any visible way. And the Fox run of the show stopped long before it had devolved into crap the way the post-90's seasons of The Simpsons have.

It's not as if revivals like this are anything new. They've been happening for decades.

The Brady Bunch was repeatedly brought back in different forms. The New Leave It To Beaver debuted nearly 30 years after the original show's debut. The 1950s show Maverick was brought back three times. Happy Days got seven spinoffs, including an animated revival. M.A.S.H. had two that picked up with the characters years later. And on and on and on.

As long as they play both sides for laughs*, they can avoid being a #MAGA show and actually be about average Americans, just as it used to be.

We'll see.

There's an argument from the left that no matter how much they play both sides for laughs, what the show is actually doing is normalizing the fatigue of living in the Trump era. While normally, I'd be inclined to call bullshit on a claim like that, in this case I believe it's true. I think the show will be a hit because people will identify with what these characters are feeling/going through whether the viewer is poor or not, but ultimately I'd love for the show to push back against how fucked up this particular time is in the same ways that All In the Family did during it's run.

It's difficult to say if it will. On one hand, some of the old writers are back and they're not disinclined to be socially liberal.

On the other hand, Rosanne, though she is herself socially liberally, is also insane. Plus, it's hard to consider anyone who still supports Trump at this point to be socially liberal. I just don't see how you can rectify your beliefs with his words and actions.

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